The church was founded by Christ.

The first time the idea of the church appears in the New Testament is in Matthew when the Lord Peter the Apostle promises to build the church after his confession of Christ, as the Lord says: “And on this rock I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18). We see in these words that the Lord came to build a church. In the Sermon on the Mount we also see that if a person disagrees with his brother, he reproaches him. And if he does not acknowledge his brother’s right, he goes to the church and it becomes the reference between him and his brother.

Church in the Bible

* This word was mentioned in Syriac Aramaic, which was spoken by the Lord: (Knesset), meaning the assembly, the congregation. Its equivalent in Greek is the word (Ekklesia), which is derived from a Greek verb meaning to call. The congregation is called to be together, the congregation is called by the word of God.

* In the New Testament, we see the Apostle Paul using this word (church) when he addresses, for example, the Corinthians and says (to the church of God which is in Corinth). So it is a group of believers who were baptized and live in one city. Then we see at the end of the apostolic era that they live in one city, around a bishop, and this bishop is the one who presides over the congregational prayer. We see in the church bishops and priests or priests, and we see deacons in it. This division is mentioned in the New Testament in the letters of Paul. But defining the church as this group connected to God, which God calls to leave its bad deeds and join Christ through baptism, and that Christ is the one who purifies it, this is what we see in the letter to the Ephesians. Christ calls the people and purifies them through the word and baptism, then they gather together on the first day of the week, as we see in Acts, to celebrate the sacrament of thanksgiving or what we later called the Divine Liturgy, under the leadership of the bishop.

* This is the image we see in the Bible of the church. It is primarily a community established in one place. Different images are given of it. I gave an example of the image of the vineyard planted by the vinedressers.We find it in Isaiah and in the Gospel of John. The image is this: the heavenly Father planted this vine, the vine is Christ and we are members of this vine. So first of all we can say that the Christian Church is not only defined as a community but as connected to Christ. This is fundamental in the Bible. And it is connected to Christ by receiving the sacraments.

* Then I was given a picture of the temple.The church is likened to a temple of which we are the living stones, a temple that grows and rises until it reaches heaven. We find this image in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians: “So then you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the cornerstone, in whom the building is perfected and grows…” (2:19-20). The image is that the church is the house of God, based on the apostolic teaching, the gospel of the apostles, and the ancient gospel brought by the prophets. It is true that the stones are joined together and support each other, but the essential thing is that it is the Lord who sanctifies the temple, places his glory in it, and places his power in it. The purpose of this temple, of this church, is for all its members to become united and a dwelling place for God in the Holy Spirit.

* We find another image in the New Testament, which is: Bride image of ChristIt is an image that we find since the Old Testament in the Prophets and the Song of Songs. The Church draws her vitality and strength from the Lord, with whom she is united in an indissoluble marriage.

* We find a very powerful image in the New Testament, which is the image of the body. The Church is the body of ChristWhen the Apostle says: “And that he might reconcile both to God in one body through the cross” (Ephesians 2:16). The Epistle to the Corinthians is full of this image, where the Apostle speaks of one body and many members and speaks of the cohesion of the members. This is the whole image that we find in the New Testament about the Church, but we hold especially to this image now: the Church is the Body of Christ.

The Church is the body of Christ

What does this word that the Apostle Paul emphasizes mean? It alone is not enough to know about the Church, but it means what follows. When the Hebrew man spoke about man, he said that he is a body that cannot be freed. The body for them is essential to the human being. For the Hebrews, man was not an imprisoned spirit as was the case in Plato’s philosophy. But for the Jews in the Torah, he was an embodied soul, so that the loss of the body made them very confused before the issue of death, judgment, and resurrection. We do not find in the Old Testament a clear teaching about resurrection, and this is precisely because they gave great value to the body. When Christians later spoke about resurrection, they spoke about the resurrection of bodies: we say that the soul adheres to the body after its resurrection. The body is the basis and foundation of the human being in Jewish and Christian theory. There is no human being without a body, and no human being continues without a body, nor does he remain in eternity without a body.

So when we say that the Church is a body, according to the expression of the Apostle Paul, we mean that the Church is an extension of Christ, a manifestation of Christ, the entity of Christ in history, His presence among people. It is possible to say that since Christ appeared in the flesh, since He appeared in time incarnate from the Virgin, the Church appeared with Him. For where the King is, His kingdom is with Him. Of course, this Church was not completed until the Lord died and rose and sent the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles, but it basically went out into the world when some fishermen gathered around the Lord and were with Him one body, they were one entity.

We cannot imagine Christ without his church, just as we cannot imagine a church without him and without his Holy Spirit.Hence, we cannot communicate with Christ today unless we communicate with His Church. If Christ is the head and the Church is the body, that is, if the Church is an extension of this in time and place, then wherever this body reaches, Christ has reached, and wherever His members reach, He has also reached. The Church is this head (Christ) that grows and takes us with Him and joins us to Himself in two ways: through baptism and through the sacrament of thanksgiving. In this sense the Apostle said: We are one body because we eat of the one bread.

The Church is in the Sacrament of Thanksgiving

When a child is formed, he has naturally become a man; we do not see him as a man, but he is potentially a man. This child will become a man in the state of growth. The Church is in a state of perpetual growth, she has joined herself to Christ, but she becomes more and more connected to Him when she receives His Body and drinks His Blood. We must take this image in a real way; it is not just a fantasy, but an actual image, a real fact. When a woman is united to a man, she receives the blood of this man, she becomes more and more his, she becomes more and more connected to him, more and more united to him, and her love grows in this common marital life, and they understand each other more and more and crystallize. Thus, whenever we receive the blood of Christ in Communion, we celebrate a wedding with Him, that is, we become one Church. We become His actual bride. Therefore, when a community gathers in Mass without receiving Communion, it has done nothing, it has not received the blood of Christ into itself, and so it does not wish to become united to Him, it is still in a state of engagement. But if it wants to be in a state of marriage, it must receive His blood into it.

We become one body because we eat from the one nucleus. We are scattered, we are a fragment and not a church. We are scattered as long as we do not gather in the divine sacrifice, and as long as we do not eat from the divine sacrifice. How can we be connected to Christ the head? How can Christ give his life in this body of which he is the head if we are cut off from this great head?

Then we do not unite with each other unless we unite at the head. Why is the Christian community disintegrated? Because each one lives alone, isolated from his brother. Each one stays at home and does not communicate with his brother. How will he see his brother unless he sees him around the divine sacrifice? He may see him at a social evening, but this is not a meeting in the body of Christ. The meeting in the body of Christ takes place in the temple of Christ.

The issue is deeper than we can sometimes imagine. We may imagine that we are Christians because we have been baptized. This is not enough. Symeon the New Theologian, a Byzantine saint of the 10th and 11th centuries, said that man is adopted by God in baptism but must then accept God, must be baptized with tears, must receive another baptism, a baptism of tears. By this he means, of course, repentance. Continuing repentance is what makes our baptism effective, otherwise it is ineffective: it is, as our saint Symeon says, just a baptism of water. Repentance is what makes it a baptism of the Holy Spirit. In other words, this belonging to the Church cannot become effective in us unless we are strengthened in this membership, unless we are aware of this belonging, unless we receive in our bodies and souls the precious Body and Blood of Christ. The issue is therefore very important. The Holy Mass, in other words, is what makes these people one Church. This is what is revealed to us in the study of the mystery of sacrifice and what is revealed to us in the New Testament in what the apostles wrote about the Church.

The Holy Spirit is an active element in the Church.

The second element in the composition of the Church is the Holy Spirit. Christ is the first building element, the foundation on which the Church grows, Christ himself is the cornerstone by which the members hold together. But when we say that the Church actually appeared to the world on the day of Pentecost and that it grows in the mystery of the Divine Sacrifice, we are saying that the second active element is the Holy Spirit, who supplies it with the sacraments and makes these sacraments its pillars. He is the one who supplies it with the diversity of gifts: the Holy Spirit gathers those with gifts into one mass, into one body. The one who makes the Church continuous, strong, diverse in gifts, yet united at the same time, is the Holy Spirit.

Unity in the Church

To understand that the Church is one body of Christ, we must understand that we joined it through baptism and we grow in it through the sacraments, especially the sacrament of Chrismation and the sacrament of thanksgiving. The Church is described in the Creed as one, holy, catholic and apostolic. She is one because Christ is one, and because he is the one who unites her. She is one throughout the ages, she is one with the Christians of the fourth, fifth and tenth centuries and with those who will come, and she is one with herself when she will be glorified in heaven. We note that this unity in the Church is based on the bishop, the metropolitan.

The bishop is the element that connects the community with the apostles. Of course, he is essentially apostolic, that is, united with the apostolic line, who completes the apostolic line by the laying on of hands. When a bishop is ordained, he is the successor of another on his throne, and this throne itself goes back to an apostle directly or indirectly. The bishop is the element of unification. This is something forgotten in our sect, not in the teaching but among the people. What has become famous today is that everyone is a master in this Church. Today, man is a master if he can be a servant. He who does not serve has no mastery. In order to preserve ecclesiastical unity, in order to preserve the teaching and its integrity, in order to administer the sacraments, in order to give the Holy Spirit to the people, an instrument was established, which is the bishop. This is something that Ignatius of Antioch, the God-bearer, reminded us of when he said: (Where the bishop is, there is the Church).

The bishop is the one who unites the Church, and when we say this we mean that he unites her with Christ, not with himself. He unites her through him as a bridge with Christ, that is, he unites her with the word that he preaches. He unites her with a doctrine that he watches over, with a doctrine that he therefore knows. This is something essential and a condition of the episcopate, as Dionysius the Areopagite says. The bishop must have knowledge of the Scriptures and the Psalms, not a simple knowledge but an interpretive knowledge. And if the Church is connected to Christ, her head, there must be a man who knows how to connect her to her head.

The bishop unites the church with himself, and when we say he unites it, this means that she is his bride and that he loves her also, because he loves to unite her with Christ. This means that the bishop’s job is primarily to love his church, to love his people, and therefore he does not differentiate between his people because they are all members of the one body of Christ and all are redeemed by the one precious blood. Therefore, one of them is not superior to the other except by virtue, but they all deserve the same service. For this reason, the bishop consults his people. But whom does he consult among his people? He consults the pious and cooperates with them, otherwise the church cannot be one, and this is a result of its unity.

It is true that the bishop is the head of the Church, but he is also a member of it. In the Divine Liturgy the bishop or priest has two roles: he is the representative of Christ to the people, but he is also the messenger of the people to Christ. It is not true in Orthodoxy to say that he is only the successor of Christ to celebrate the Liturgy or to administer the Church. He is also the representative of the people to God. For this reason he is obliged to consult the people. Why? Because the people are also members of Christ, and the bishop does not remain a member without getting to know the members. He listens primarily to those in whom the Holy Spirit speaks, because the author of the Book of Revelation tells the churches to listen to what the Spirit says to them. The Holy Spirit does not speak through scholars unless they are also pious. The Holy Spirit does not necessarily speak through priests unless they are good. Therefore, from among his people whom he serves, the bishop is surrounded primarily by the pious. Thus the Church is united and contributes to the unity of Christ.

The church is a community of repentant and sanctified people.

The Church is holy because it is sanctified by the Head. Sin enters the Church and at the same time it is holy. This is the strangeness or paradox of the Church. It is the community of sinners who repent (Ephram the Syrian). The members of the Church always sin, but they are in a state of repentance because they are sanctified by the precious body and blood of the Lord. This sanctification means that they are set apart to serve the Lord. They seek Christ and seek only Christ, otherwise they are not holy. The holy in the Church does not mean the pure person because there is no pure person in the Church. Every person is a liar, this is what David says. But what does David decide later? He says: (How shall I repay the Lord for all that he has given me? I will accept the cup of salvation, and I will call on the name of the Lord). All the members of the Church are caught in a lie by the wrong positions they stand, but they can always set themselves apart for Christ. They are not therefore of this world but of Christ. Therefore, the aim of the Church is only to be sanctified. She cannot be present in this world, active and good in it, unless she knows that she is not of this world and that she is seeking the Second Coming. She is like a fiancée waiting for her fiancé. The Church awaits the coming of the Lord in the sacraments every Sunday, awaits His coming in the Word, and then awaits Him on the last day. Therefore, the Church is a stranger to this world, just as Christ was a stranger and was alienated by his own people. Therefore, the Church has no attachment to this world and has no interests in this world. She serves this world.

The church is universal

The Church is catholic first and foremost in the superficial geographical sense. It unites all peoples, neither slave nor free, neither Greek nor Jew, you are all free in Christ Jesus. And we have this amazing phenomenon that nothing unites like Christ. The Church unites not only peoples but also ages, so that each age is faithful to the previous ages. Here I must remind you of something. My concern is not only to be one with my contemporaries, the other Christians, but also to be one with Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, and Gregory Palamas. My concern, then, is to be faithful to this vertical line that came down to us from the apostles. This superficial horizontal concern, to be one in the world, is a valid concern and I must follow it, but not at the expense of the basic vertical line, which is to be one with all the saints and martyrs who bore witness to God in the past ages.

The church is apostolic

The meaning is clear: it is one with the apostles in the priestly order, one with them in the same teaching. It is also apostolic in the sense that it is missionary and carries out the message. The message can be viewed if we look to the past and say that it is apostolic. But we can say that we are apostolic if we look to the future, and this is also essential. We often look to the past and do not look to the present in which we are and to the future. The Church does not live by repeating and boasting about its apostleship. This is God’s grace upon us. But the Church lives because it wants to be like the apostles. This means that the apostle has nothing and has only to deliver the message that he was given. So we are an apostolic Church today and here to the extent that we care to carry out the message of Christ. And the message of Christ is not carried out only through teaching, and we have little teaching, and it is not carried out only by administering rituals, and this is beautiful and necessary and constructive, but teaching is carried out in all ways, and the message is carried out when we visit the poor and deprived completely, when we carry this whole world on our shoulders. And we can carry it to the extent that we are independent of it. He who is excluded from this world, who desires it and wants it, cannot serve it. He who has made it his lord cannot fulfill a mission before it.

The Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic in the Divine Liturgy, around the Word, and in service.

How do we understand that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic? How do we understand that it is the Body of Christ? This means, first and foremost, and very simply, that we are where Christ is. And Christ is present in the Divine Liturgy. So do not boast about Orthodoxy in a person who does not go to the Divine Liturgy. He who receives the Body of the Lord in every sacrifice has shown that he understands his faith more deeply, takes on its membership more and more. He who draws from all the mysteries, he who comes into contact with the Holy Scriptures, understands them, publishes them and broadcasts them, this is also more deeply part of the Church.

Since the Church is the gathering around the Word of God, around Christ who is the Word of God, it also means that we commit ourselves to the charitable works in it and that we all do them and participate in them as much as we can. It means that we adopt the needs of people not only within our charitable associations but that each of us bears his share of responsibility in this world through social work and witness in the circles in which God has placed us.

Church also means rallying around the bishop and priests, which means not being fawning. A person should not be praised except at his funeral or in his absence, because when we praise him, the devil of vanity can creep in. And whoever praises a person, even a bishop, this means that he wants an interest for himself. A basic concern is that our name should always be mentioned on the altar of the Lord and not once a year. Rallying, then, is to be one group so that we can eliminate the seeds of division. When we see attempts at division in a church or group, we must go with a spirit of kindness to bring these people back to the fold, and thus the church is not just a verbal affiliation recorded on an identity card, but an actual affiliation.

Conclusion

We must be aware of our baptism and our responsibility, receive the sacrament of thanksgiving, and engage in the good works that are being done, and push our bishop, our priest, and all our people to shoulder their responsibilities, so that Christ may be known in this world and become a light to the world.

Bishop George Khodr

This article is the text of a talk given by His Eminence Bishop George Khodr in 1965 (he was an archimandrite at the time) at a training session organized by the Orthodox Youth Movement in Beirut. Those who wish to read more about His Eminence’s views on the theology of the Church should refer to Chapter Eight of the book (Introduction to Christian Doctrine), by Kosti Bandali and a group of authors, third edition, Al-Nour Publications, 1982.